This week at the iSchool

iSchoolers in the News

Professor Karen Fisher was interviewed by KING-TV about her work with Syrian refugee children. Fisher recently returned to Za’atari Refugee Camp to begin a pilot project to preserve the Syrians’ cultural memories.

Assistant Professor Katie Davis is teaming up with a professor from the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences on an outdoors app designed to get kids to explore nature. A $400,000 UW Innovation Award will help get the app off the ground over the next couple of years.

TASCHA announced a new project, Data for Democracy. Based in Myanmar, its goal is to build the data capabilities of the country’s emerging infrastructure.

Ph.D. candidate Norah Abokhodair’s work was featured in Futurity. Abokhodair and colleagues studied the social media reaction after the Paris terror attacks of November 2015 and found that Twitter users defended Muslims and Islam after an initial backlash against them.

And a New York Times story on how satellite imagery can be used to detect poverty includes a reference to Assistant Professor Joshua Blumenstock’s work with cellphone data.

Elsewhere in Information News

The Library of Congress has dropped the term “illegal aliens” in favor of a less dehumanizing term, undocumented immigrants. Fusion reports how librarianship students from Dartmouth University helped make it happen.

From Re/code, you may think that young people have left Facebook in the dust as they flock to Snapchat or Instagram. They haven’t.